Zomato Acquires TongueStun For $18 Million In Cash And Stock Deal

Online food-ordering platform Zomato has announced that it has acquired TongueStun, a Bangalore-based startup in a cash and stock deal worth $18 million. The company says that with this acquisition, it aims to provide its users with an important use case – to order food for pickup from their cafeterias using the Zomato app.

TongueStun is the leader in the corporate cafeteria sector, and currently has its footprints in six cities – Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, and Gurgaon/Noida. The startup has a large pool of clientele, including IBM, Accenture, Ernst & Young, Sony, Genpact, 3M, Mindtree and Deloitte.

ADVERTISEMENT

TongueStun was founded in 2012 by Manjunath Ramakrishnan and had so far raised around $5 million funding from Unicorn Ventures, the early stage investing arm of investment bank o3 Capital and Haresh Chawla, a partner at private equity fund True North.

The startup now caters to as many as 1,500 companies and provides 1,50,000 meals daily to office-goers through its 1,000-plus food partners. Zomato notes that all of TongueStun’s customers, all contracts stay intact, and the company’s business will go on as usual.

“Everything will run as smoothly as it previously did. With more execution muscle, we are only going to provide TongueStun’s users more delight and better food choices. Our increased speed of growth will benefit our food partners – caterers and restaurants tremendously. The team will stay intact as 100 percent of the team at TongueStun is being retained in their original roles,” the company explains in a blog post. The company also confirms that TongueStun founder Manjunath Ramakrishnan is now a part of the Zomato core team.

Last year, Zomato acquired food delivery service Runnr, adding over 1,500 people to its kitty. Runnr was originally known as Roadrunnr, and offered B2B services for hyperlocal deliveries – this grew slowly, and last year, Roadrunnr acquired troubled food delivery service TinyOwl, and changed its name to Runnr, through which you could order food and track delivery, much like with Swiggy — Zomato’s biggest competition in the Indian market currently.

After working as a Consultant for several swanky hotels across the globe, Chintan has now joined the Venture Dreams team to write about Business. He is hoping that his Master's Degree in International Business comes in handy. You can reach him via email - [email protected]